More SMU Research news

Cowan writes: ” ‘My hope is that the next generation of experiments will discover dark matter” within the next few years,’ says CDMS II researcher Jodi Cooley of Southern Methodist University in Dallas. After making their initial discovery, researchers could then tailor experiments to unveil dark matter’s detailed nature, she says.”

EXCERPT:

“The workers have journeyed deep into the Earth to plumb the darkest depths of the cosmos, hunting for the missing material believed to account for 83 percent of the universe’s mass.

That material, known as dark matter, must exist, astronomers say, because the cosmic allotment of ordinary, visible matter doesn’t provide enough gravitational glue to hold galaxies together. Although the missing material shouldn’t be any more prevalent in the underworld than above ground, dark matter hunters have good reason to frequent Soudan and other subterranean lairs. Because dark matter particles would interact so weakly, experiments designed to detect the dark stuff could easily be overwhelmed by the cacophony of other particles. So scientists at Soudan and elsewhere use Earth’s crust to filter out cosmic rays — charged particles from space that bombard Earth’s atmosphere.

Physicists have been directly searching for dark matter for more than two decades. But until recently, only one experiment, beneath a mountain in central Italy, had consistently reported evidence of the invisible particles. Now two more experiments have found similar hints. When taken together, the findings suggest that the most popular models for dark matter may not be correct — the particles pegged have a lower mass than many physicists had proposed.